Local woman launches recycled plastic bikini range

SCIENCE graduate and OceanZen Bikini owner Steph Gabriel has launched a new bikini range with a difference: It's made of plastic.

Ms Gabriel launched her "passion project", OceanZen Bikini, while studying at The University of the Sunshine Coast in 2014.

"I wanted to create a lifestyle label that my friends and I loved (and that) other girls like us could relate to," Ms Gabriel said.

OceanZen had become a support network for a community of women who cared about oceans as well as a sustainable swimwear label, she said.

Through her business she shared updates on marine conservation projects, using Instagram to post photos and videos of whales in Tonga, sea lions at the Galapagos Islands, and sharing marine conservation messages.

Plastic pollution has become a growing problem for marine conservation globally, prompting Ms Gabriel's interest in the Italian product Econyl, which she has used for her third swimwear range.

The product is made from recycled bottles and plastics.

"...What happens is they...collect plastic bottles from the ocean, and fishing nets, shred it, clean it, (and) turn it into a yarn," she said.

This yarn was combined with lycra to make a final product that's 78% recycled plastic, she said.

Ms Gabriel remembers the moment her path as an advocate for marine life was set.

She was working with a tour company in the Cayman Islands six years ago, swimming with 60 stingrays that lived at a sandbar the company sailed to every day.

Her job was to swim to the ocean floor and "lure" the tame stingrays to the surface so tourists could swim with and feed them.

"You'd swim down and kind of give them a big hug," she said. "You spread your arms and they swim into you, and you just swim upwards with you."

The extraordinary beauty and intelligence of these large, sometimes dangerous animals opened her eyes to "how misjudged" they were, Ms Gabriel said. "It fascinated me and I wanted to protect it," she said.